The 3 Biggest Challenges Your Brand Would Face On Snapchat Today

There are 3 major challenges your brand would face when jumping onto Snapchat. Let’s break them down:

Building An Audience

There are currently four ways to add a friend on Snapchat and all are a manual process. For example, when adding a friend by user name, you have to type in their name perfectly because Snapchat does not offer suggestions. Moreover, Snapchat does not feature users or offer a way for a brand to promote their account within the app. What this has done, is hindered scalability.

In order to overcome this and build a sizable audience, you will need a strategy to encourage users to manually add your brand. This can include cross-channel promotional content on other social media or placing your brand’s Snapcode, a QR code for Snapchat, in place where it can be easily scanned.

Creating Content That Disappears

On Snapchat, the content your brand will share will disappear in 24 hours. This is unlike any of the other social platforms where historical content gives credibility. This has led to a low bar for production quality, but a high one for experiences.

To create these experiences, the content while lacking production quality needs to be great. Exclusive events and behind the scenes do well on the platform. For example, MTVs Snapchat coverage of the VMAs earned 12 million views.

There are also many ways to make ordinary things into an experience with the app. Many Snapchat artists, such as Cyrene Quiamco, like to include their fans’ art in their stories.

Limited Analytics

Like the early days of now established social platforms, Snapchat analytics are limited. It will be your community manager’s job to log analytics because like the snaps, the analytics also disappear within 24 hours.

The primary metric on the platform is completion rate which is calculated by dividing views of the last snap in the story by views of the first snap. Keep in mind that this is only part of the picture because Snapchat stories can be easily skipped through with a tap of finger. Focusing solely on completion rate can lead to stories with a high completion rate and little time actually watched.

The same applies to screenshots, a metric to measure engagement but is only part of the picture. Users can share these screenshots across other platforms, but without a measurement plan such as a hashtag, these data points will be lost.

The Maze Runner’s #Survivethenight by VaynerMedia

What can happen when you overcome these three obstacles?